The Connecticut House on Wednesday approved a bill that intends to make it easier for patients to receive insurance coverage for treatment in residential facilities, the Hartford Courant reports. The bill, which passed in the Senate on May 1, will be sent to Gov. Jodi Rell (R) for final approval.

The survival rate of infants born before 24 weeks’ gestation in the United Kingdom did not change from 1994 to 2005, according to a study published Friday in the journal BMJ, Reuters UK reports.

The Pew Hispanic Center on Thursday released an analysis that found that Hispanic women in the U.S. — whether they are U.S. born or immigrants — have higher fertility rates than non-Hispanic women, the AP/Hartford Courant reports (Gamboa, AP/Hartford Courant, 5/8).

Physician John Knowles in 1975 wrote a book identifying the lack of emphasis on preventive care as a shortcoming of the U.S. health care system, and since then, “the shift toward prevention and detection has been salutary but insufficient,” Robert Goldberg, vice president of the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest, writes in a

Efforts by Senate Republicans to remove two Medicaid provisions from a $193 billion supplemental war appropriations bill “have been rebuffed by Democrats,” CQ Today reports (Armstrong, CQ Today, 5/9). Senate Finance Committee ranking member Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) on Thursday in a letter asked

Some Senate Republicans are pushing to remove provisions in the supplemental war spending measure that would prevent seven new Medicaid regulations from taking effect until April 1, 2009, CQ Today reports. Republicans also are attempting to remove a provision in the bill that would ban physician-owned specialty hospitals from receiving Medicare payments. The House approved the delay in Medicaid legislation (

The black-white infant mortality gap continues to grow in most of Michigan’s large urban areas despite progress in reducing risk factors among blacks, according to a recent study, the Flint Journal reports. The Michigan branch of Kids Count conducted the study through the

Beta-blocker drugs may help prevent heart attacks during surgery, but they may increase the risk of death and major stroke, says a major study to be published online by the prestigious medical journal, The Lancet.POISE is the world’s largest randomized trial addressing perioperative cardiac complications. POISE evaluated the effects of a beta-blocker versus placebo given to patients around the time of surgery.

A team of researchers has recently shown that the administration of sildenafil protects the heart in mice with Duchenne muscular dystrophy. This study was led by Dr. Christine Des Rosiers from the Universite de Montreal and the Montreal Heart Institute, in collaboration with Dr. Basil Petrof of the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (MUHC) and Dr. Christian Deschepper of the Institut de recherches cliniques de Montreal.

Are the health needs of women adequately addressed by medical research as it is currently conducted? In the May issue of Mayo Clinic Proceedings, a team of Australian researchers and two cardiologists closely examine this question.”The traditional model of medical research was limited by gender and racial blindness and assumed that results of research on white male participants could be easily extrapolated to female and minority populations,” write Wendy Rogers, B.M.B.S.